New hardware creates hard feelings in Arbela Township
By Tom Gilchrist
Staff Writer
ARBELA TWP. — No one owned up to ordering the new computers being used in the Arbela Township offices Monday night, though township resident James Bucy and Trustee Wayne Schultz repeatedly asked who authorized the purchase.
While Bucy said the deal involved $20,000 of computers, township Clerk Mary Warren said the amount is $12,000.
“Who ordered the computers?” Schultz asked Warren and their fellow board members — Treasurer Jody Hunt, Supervisor Kenneth Panek and Trustee William Jacobi — near the end of Monday’s Board of Trustees meeting.
“Ken (Panek),” replied Warren, referring to the supervisor on her right.
“I didn’t order them,” Panek said.
Township resident Joann Helmbold questioned Panek’s “integrity.”
“Integrity is the bottom line, and Ken, I have a real problem,” Helmbold said. “Last month, I heard you imply that you didn’t know who ordered the computers — as far as you know, they just kind of showed up. And then a little later on, you said something about ordering them.”
“I do know who ordered them,” said Panek, adding township leaders first discussed the new computers on Nov. 13, 2013 — prior to the current fiscal year that started April 1.
“I have a real problem with lack of integrity, Ken,” Helmbold said. “If you cannot have integrity, maybe you’d better resign, because the people in this township at least deserve integrity.”
Panek said the computers were ordered in the wrong budget year.
“The current budget we’re working on does not have any money for those (computers) in there, so that’s the problem,” Panek said.
“I don’t agree that that’s the problem,” Bucy said. “I think the problem is that the way things are running down here, somebody on this board could go out and buy a car for somebody else on this board, and it would never come before the public.”
Bucy alleged that “at the very least” the purchase of the new computers violated the township’s purchasing policy.
“Where are the minutes of the meeting where it was agreed, in an open meeting, that those computers could be purchased?” Bucy asked.
Jack Warren, Mary Warren’s husband, also quizzed Schultz and Panek about the situation.
“You and Wayne (Schultz) and the rest of the board all voted to pay the bills when you bought them computers, didn’t you?” Jack Warren asked. “Now you’re sitting around denying how much they cost and this and that.”
Schultz said he voted against paying the bill for the computers, and Mary Warren confirmed Schultz’s assertion.
“It doesn’t matter if it got paid or not. The question is, who authorized it?” Schultz asked.
Mary Warren replied that “The bottom line is that the mistake was made when it wasn’t brought to a board meeting and made a motion on.”
Jack Warren accused Panek and Schultz of “trying to pawn this whole thing off on the treasurer and the clerk.”
“That’s where the lack of integrity comes in,” Warren added. “Lack! L … A … C … K.”
Panek insisted he, Schultz and Jacobi didn’t see any paperwork regarding purchase of the computers until the machines arrived at the township hall.
“Why did you vote to pay the bills then?” Jack Warren replied. “Silence?”
The clerk’s husband continued on.
“This township’s the laughingstock of the county, Panek,” he said. “After you (and Schultz) came (on the township board), there’s nothin’ that’s any better here than it was before you came. Not one thing.”
“You sit out here every meeting and catcall,” Panek replied. “Is that helping anything?”
In other action, the board voted not to pay for removal of roadside brush. Some residents complained about dead trees in road rights-of-way. In other parts of Michigan, according to Helmbold, fallen trees blocking a river disappear under cover of darkness.
“What do the canoe livery owners do if they get a tree kind of blocking the river? In the dead of the night, somebody goes down and just kind of cuts it out and the canoes travel on down the river,” Helmbold said. “And it just happens in the dead of the night without the (state) DNR’s intervention. Maybe start doing that with cutting trees down that are in the road right-of-way. In the dead of the night, they just disappear, and nobody knows.”